About
Establishment of an electronic corpus of Classical Tamil literature and the corresponding historical lexicon informed by emic exegetical and lexicographical sources
Tamilex is a project hosted at the University of Hamburg and funded by the Hamburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The Academy has generously provided Tamilex with a long-term grant in view of producing a historical dictionary of Classical Tamil. Classical Tamil contributed one of the great literary traditions of mankind. Continuously transmitted for over two thousand years, it has however not attracted enough scholarly attention and remains mostly untranslated today. The corpus comprises poetry, epics, and a scholarly tradition, which, for the most part, is based on grammar, poetics, metrics, & lexicography. Since the literary tradition was evidently composed in an erudite idiom, far removed from everyday spoken language with regional dialectal variation, Classical Tamil literature was preserved by a strong commentarial tradition. The project is establishing an electronic corpus of the most important texts, roughly of the first millennium, based on extensive preliminary work in the form of critical editions, translations, and digitisation. In the first phase, text concordances — where every word, with its derivations and variant readings, is indexed — will form the basis of a historical lexicon giving definitions both in English and in modern Tamil. Then, medieval Tamil glosses from commentarial and lexicographic traditions will be added to the dictionary entries. Each entry will illustrate the many different meanings of a word, whether it is due to semantic development over time, or due to poetic polysemy. Every occurrence of every word in the corpus will be indexed, and the citations are linked back to the electronic corpus both for the texts and the commentaries along with their manuscript witnesses. Earlier printed dictionaries are cross-referenced. The online Tamilex dictionary combines linguistic, philological, and manuscriptological data, allowing direct engagement with source texts, exegetical materials and lexicographical works